I first found BigFooty place after being directed there by a good friend. My mate had been around there for a while. He posts as SweetLeftFoot and is known for his sometimes blatant, sometimes annoying and sometimes exquisitely crafted, trolling of opposition teams and posters.

What makes the mouthy bugger such a good troll is that, despite what many might think, he actually does his know his footy. That’s the key to quality trolling: it has to have enough basis in fact to be believable enough to lure the credulous into replying and thus giving the troll what he/she/it wants.

However, trolling BigFooty is easy. Anybody with half a brain and a boss who doesn’t monitor Internet usage can do it. So it was, after listening to SLF droning on in the pub for half an hour about how he’d “pwnd” — yes, he did manage to pronounce it “powned” and he actually says LOL and OMG out loud too — people on BigFooty, I decided I’d set him a challenge.

I said: Why don’t you step up your game? Why don’t you troll the footy “meat world”? He’d had some success in this before with his lurid and frankly unsettling semi-fictional work Rebecca’s Journey being read in footy newsrooms and being hailed to wide acclaim on Bay13, yet it had signally failed to drive Sam Lane to a career ending nervous breakdown, his stated aim in creating the depraved tract.

This time I suggested, why not set up something that’s achievable. You make up a lie, a whole cloth fiction, and see if you can get a run in the real world. You make a footy story, spin out on BigFooty and if it makes The Age or SEN, then I’ll buy you a slab.

A few days later I get a text. It simply reads “Trade week. Gav Urquhart for Patrick Veszpremi.”

The campaign was underway.

We'd have been surprised too - if it was true.

The email hoax was put together by some disaffected Essendon* fans from "BomberBlitz.com".

They say they wanted to see if the media would run a story without checking the facts.

"The aim was to see if it was published… I thought if I sent it off the newspapers may believe it, but I wasn't expecting to see it published word for word.

— Statement from a Bomber fan to Media Watch"

The email included a fabricated story with a bogus byline from Ray Wilson of The West Australian.

The Age and The West have a copy sharing deal so The Age was happy to use the story that they thought was written by their friends in Perth.

Only problem of course, it wasn't.

And worse still - once The Age ran it, The West Australian took their word that it was true - so then they ran the phoney story too.

Essendon* cheated, simple as that